Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday October 19, 2011 @05:30AM
from the starring-nick-nolte-and-eddie-murphy dept.

The Opposable Thumbs blog covers a 48-hour-long "game jam" at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Twenty teams of game developers — 16 indie and four professional — compete over a weekend to build a functional game based on a few deliberately vague keywords. This article documents the brainstorming sessions and the early prototyping work. Quoting:
"The teams become less talkative as midnight draws near and the individual team members all settle down into their jobs. Everybody seems determined to not let sleep take over just yet. I take a tour of some of the other teams. Badgers are being animated, leg movements first with static bodies above them. Other teams have no art yet and just use colored rectangles as they get the mechanics down. Others are still sketching beautiful concept art and coding level editors.'To move around the room is to hear random snippets of creativity and math. 'If we move the z-axis, too, we can do this thing' or 'what if we procedurally generated that object.' In this one spot, sixteen games are coming into being that weren't even concepts eight hours ago."

Go to http://globalgamejam.org/ [globalgamejam.org] it is the same thing, (a 48 hour design and build a game session) but it is organized globally. I have done it twice now and it is so much fun. You don't need any real experience in game development, but any helps. But, even if you don't know anything about coding, art, music, or anything like that, you can still help out by being a tester, or a gopher. It's free, and very fun. The one coming up is January 27-29 and chances are, there is a site near you. If there isn't, you can start one. All you need to know is on the web site I linked. Have fun, and game on.